News

Bob Stuart of Meridian with Neil Young at Meridian HQ (photo credit: Meridian)

Whenever I hear Neil Young's name these days, I can't help but think Pono. Neil recently paid Meridian a visit at their Cambridgeshire headquarters and got the full tour. You can read all about it on Meridian's website but if you're anything like me you'll walk away still wondering.

Omnifone was selected to power the PonoMusic store because of its award-winning cloud music platform and its industry-leading audio expertise and commitment to audio quality. Standing at 35 million tracks, MusicStation - Omnifone’s cloud music platform - hosts the industry’s largest catalogue of high resolution content, obtained from rights holders in all corners of the world. This rich collection of premium quality audio - and its distributed delivery from the cloud - will enable PonoMusic to achieve global scale quickly.

Yours truly penned a four-page intro to computer audio that appears in this month's Sound & Vision. This marks the first edition of the new merged titans Home Theater + Sound & Vision and it's chock full of sights and sounds to explore.

Regardless of how you look at the data, the truth of the matter is hard drives fail. Some sooner than others which is the good news/bad news aspect illustrated by this fairly exhaustive, more so for the Seagate drives apparently, 27,000+ drive study by cloud storage provider Backblaze. While this is certainly worth a full read since Backblaze talks about specific models (hint: if you want the most reliable, pick Hitachi) the take-away point that anyone with music stored on a hard drive should take away is—Back Up Your Music!

Thanks to Stereophile's Ariel Bitran for the heads up on this one. Noisey is hosting their first ever "Listening Party" featuring the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' upcoming Mosquito in its entirety.

Remember the unifying universal experience of listening to an album for the first time the day it hits stores? Judging by our age demographic breakdown, you probably don't. Music's migration to the digital stage over the past 20 years has brought with it an abundance of positive developments—the ways we discover, distribute, and interact with music has evolved immeasurably—but we've lost something vital along the way. The experience of being a listener went from record releases dates, music mags, and "we," to album leaks, 140 characters, and "I."

Do you remember OraStream? In brief, I got to demo a "proof-of-concept" online service that provided 24/96 streaming rates (>2000 kbps according to the OraStream player). You can read more about that here. Since then Orastream has been busy working toward the launch of their forthcoming lossless music locker service. What's that? Frankie Tan, CEO of mp4sls the developer of OraStream, gave us hint in his comments to my last post, "We'll launch a web-service next for content owners to get their music into Orastream and stream-able on mobile devices and web browsers." For the past few weeks, I've been uploading, storing and streaming back my CD-quality music through OraStream's beta site.

Neil Young and Pono are back in the news after a long hiatus of newsworthiness. Rolling Stone reports, "He's [Young] working with a Singaporean company on a method to 'maintain our quality level when we go to streaming.'" My best guess is that Singaporean company is none other than OraStream (who else would it be?), the company behind the Naxos high-res classical service.

Bandcamp grew by 35% last year. Fans pay artists $4.3 million dollars every month using the site, and they buy about 25,000 records a day, which works out to about one every 4 seconds (you can see a real-time feed of those purchases on our desktop home page). Nearly 6 million fans have bought music through Bandcamp (half of whom are younger than 30), and hundreds of thousands of artists have sold music on Bandcamp. Digital album sales on Bandcamp grew 14% in 2015 while dropping 3% industry-wide, track sales grew 11% while dropping 13% industry-wide, vinyl was up 40%, cassettes 49%… even CD sales grew 10% (down 11% industry-wide). Most importantly of all, Bandcamp has been profitable (in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense) since 2012.